OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A Key to Your Heart: Biometric Authentication Based on ECG Signals
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

In recent years, there has been a shift of interest towards the field of biometric authentication, which proves the identity of the user using their biological characteristics. We explore a novel biometric based on the electrical activity of the human heart in the form of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. In order to explore the stability of ECG as a biometric, we collect data from 55 participants over two sessions with a period of 4 months in between. We also use a consumer-grade ECG monitor that is more affordable and usable than a medical-grade counterpart. Using a standard approach to evaluate our classifier, we obtain error rates of 2.4% for data collected within one session and 9.7% for data collected across two sessions. The experimental results suggest that ECG signals collected using a consumer-grade monitor can be successfully used for user authentication.
Theory of the Frequency Principle for General Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Along with fruitful applications of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to realistic problems, recently, some empirical studies of DNNs reported a universal phenomenon of Frequency Principle (F-Principle): a DNN tends to learn a target function from low to high frequencies during the training. The F-Principle has been very useful in providing both qualitative and quantitative understandings of DNNs. In this paper, we rigorously investigate the F-Principle for the training dynamics of a general DNN at three stages: initial stage, intermediate stage, and final stage. For each stage, a theorem is provided in terms of proper quantities characterizing the F-Principle. Our results are general in the sense that they work for multilayer networks with general activation functions, population densities of data, and a large class of loss functions. Our work lays a theoretical foundation of the F-Principle for a better understanding of the training process of DNNs.
Learning from weakly dependent data under Dobrushin's condition
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Statistical learning theory has largely focused on learning and generalization given independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) samples. Motivated by applications involving time-series data, there has been a growing literature on learning and generalization in settings where data is sampled from an ergodic process. This work has also developed complexity measures, which appropriately extend the notion of Rademacher complexity to bound the generalization error and learning rates of hypothesis classes in this setting. Rather than time-series data, our work is motivated by settings where data is sampled on a network or a spatial domain, and thus do not fit well within the framework of prior work. We provide learning and generalization bounds for data that are complexly dependent, yet their distribution satisfies the standard Dobrushin's condition. Indeed, we show that the standard complexity measures of Gaussian and Rademacher complexities and VC dimension are sufficient measures of complexity for the purposes of bounding the generalization error and learning rates of hypothesis classes in our setting. Moreover, our generalization bounds only degrade by constant factors compared to their i.i.d. analogs, and our learnability bounds degrade by log factors in the size of the training set.
Generating Counterfactual and Contrastive Explanations using SHAP
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

With the advent of GDPR, the domain of explainable AI and model interpretability has gained added impetus. Methods to extract and communicate visibility into decision-making models have become legal requirement. Two specific types of explanations, contrastive and counterfactual have been identified as suitable for human understanding. In this paper, we propose a model agnostic method and its systemic implementation to generate these explanations using shapely additive explanations (SHAP). We discuss a generative pipeline to create contrastive explanations and use it to further to generate counterfactual datapoints. This pipeline is tested and discussed on the IRIS, Wine Quality & Mobile Features dataset. Analysis of the results obtained follows.
Adversarial Examples to Fool Iris Recognition Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Adversarial examples have recently proven to be able to fool deep learning methods by adding carefully crafted small perturbation to the input space image. In this paper, we study the possibility of generating adversarial examples for code-based iris recognition systems. Since generating adversarial examples requires back-propagation of the adversarial loss, conventional filter bank-based iris-code generation frameworks cannot be employed in such a setup. Therefore, to compensate for this shortcoming, we propose to train a deep auto-encoder surrogate network to mimic the conventional iris code generation procedure. This trained surrogate network is then deployed to generate the adversarial examples using the iterative gradient sign method algorithm. We consider non-targeted and targeted attacks through three attack scenarios. Considering these attacks, we study the possibility of fooling an iris recognition system in white-box and black-box frameworks.
Automatic Acrostic Couplet Generation with Three-Stage Neural Network Pipelines
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

As one of the quintessence of Chinese traditional culture, couplet compromises two syntactically symmetric clauses equal in length, namely, an antecedent and subsequent clause. Moreover, corresponding characters and phrases at the same position of the two clauses are paired with each other under certain constraints of semantic and/or syntactic relatedness. Automatic couplet generation is recognized as a challenging problem even in the Artificial Intelligence field. In this paper, we comprehensively study on automatic generation of acrostic couplet with the first characters defined by users. The complete couplet generation is mainly divided into three stages, that is, antecedent clause generation pipeline, subsequent clause generation pipeline and clause re-ranker. To realize semantic and/or syntactic relatedness between two clauses, attention-based Sequence-to-Sequence (S2S) neural network is employed. Moreover, to provide diverse couplet candidates for re-ranking, a cluster-based beam search approach is incorporated into the S2S network. Both BLEU metrics and human judgments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed method. Eventually, a mini-program based on this generation system is developed and deployed on Wechat for real users.
Exploiting Unsupervised Pre-training and Automated Feature Engineering for Low-resource Hate Speech Detection in Polish
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

This paper presents our contribution to PolEval 2019 Task 6: Hate speech and bullying detection. We describe three parallel approaches that we followed: fine-tuning a pre-trained ULMFiT model to our classification task, fine-tuning a pre-trained BERT model to our classification task, and using the TPOT library to find the optimal pipeline. We present results achieved by these three tools and review their advantages and disadvantages in terms of user experience. Our team placed second in subtask 2 with a shallow model found by TPOT: a~logistic regression classifier with non-trivial feature engineering.
The Saeed-Liu-Tian-Gao-Li authenticated key agreement protocol is insecure
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2019
Year: 2019

A recently proposed authenticated key agreement protocol is shown to be insecure. In particular, one of the two parties is not authenticated, allowing an active man in the middle opponent to replay old messages. The protocol is essentially an authenticated Diffie-Hellman key agreement scheme, and the lack of authentication allows an attacker to replay old messages and have them accepted. Moreover, if the ephemeral key used to compute a protocol message is ever compromised, then the key established using the replayed message will also be compromised. Fixing the problem is simple - there are many provably secure and standardised protocols which are just as efficient as the flawed scheme.
Baidu-UTS Submission to the EPIC-Kitchens Action Recognition Challenge 2019
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

In this report, we present the Baidu-UTS submission to the EPIC-Kitchens Action Recognition Challenge in CVPR 2019. This is the winning solution to this challenge. In this task, the goal is to predict verbs, nouns, and actions from the vocabulary for each video segment. The EPIC-Kitchens dataset contains various small objects, intense motion blur, and occlusions. It is challenging to locate and recognize the object that an actor interacts with. To address these problems, we utilize object detection features to guide the training of 3D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), which can significantly improve the accuracy of noun prediction. Specifically, we introduce a Gated Feature Aggregator module to learn from the clip feature and the object feature. This module can strengthen the interaction between the two kinds of activations and avoid gradient exploding. Experimental results demonstrate our approach outperforms other methods on both seen and unseen test set.
A Bandit Approach to Posterior Dialog Orchestration Under a Budget
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2019
Year: 2019

Building multi-domain AI agents is a challenging task and an open problem in the area of AI. Within the domain of dialog, the ability to orchestrate multiple independently trained dialog agents, or skills, to create a unified system is of particular significance. In this work, we study the task of online posterior dialog orchestration, where we define posterior orchestration as the task of selecting a subset of skills which most appropriately answer a user input using features extracted from both the user input and the individual skills. To account for the various costs associated with extracting skill features, we consider online posterior orchestration under a skill execution budget. We formalize this setting as Context Attentive Bandit with Observations (CABO), a variant of context attentive bandits, and evaluate it on simulated non-conversational and proprietary conversational datasets.
Deep Single Image Deraining Via Estimating Transmission and Atmospheric Light in rainy Scenes
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2019
Year: 2019

Rain removal in images/videos is still an important task in computer vision field and attracting attentions of more and more people. Traditional methods always utilize some incomplete priors or filters (e.g. guided filter) to remove rain effect. Deep learning gives more probabilities to better solve this task. However, they remove rain either by evaluating background from rainy image directly or learning a rain residual first then subtracting the residual to obtain a clear background. No other models are used in deep learning based de-raining methods to remove rain and obtain other information about rainy scenes. In this paper, we utilize an extensively-used image degradation model which is derived from atmospheric scattering principles to model the formation of rainy images and try to learn the transmission, atmospheric light in rainy scenes and remove rain further. To reach this goal, we propose a robust evaluation method of global atmospheric light in a rainy scene. Instead of using the estimated atmospheric light directly to learn a network to calculate transmission, we utilize it as ground truth and design a simple but novel triangle-shaped network structure to learn atmospheric light for every rainy image, then fine-tune the network to obtain a better estimation of atmospheric light during the training of transmission network. Furthermore, more efficient ShuffleNet Units are utilized in transmission network to learn transmission map and the de-raining image is then obtained by the image degradation model. By subjective and objective comparisons, our method outperforms the selected state-of-the-art works.
Bayesian Optimization with Directionally Constrained Search
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

Bayesian optimization offers a flexible framework to optimize an objective function that is expensive to be evaluated. A Bayesian optimizer iteratively queries the function values on its carefully selected points. Subsequently, it makes a sensible recommendation about where the optimum locates based on its accumulated knowledge. This procedure usually demands a long execution time. In practice, however, there often exists a computational budget or an evaluation limitation allocated to an optimizer, due to the resource scarcity. This constraint demands an optimizer to be aware of its remaining budget and able to spend it wisely, in order to return as better a point as possible. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian optimization approach in this evaluation-limited scenario. Our approach is based on constraining searching directions so as to dedicate the model capability to the most promising area. It could be viewed as a combination of local and global searching policies, which aims at reducing inefficient exploration in the local searching areas, thus making a searching policy more efficient. Experimental studies are conducted on both synthetic and real-world applications. The results demonstrate the superior performance of our newly proposed approach in searching for the optimum within a prescribed evaluation budget.
Effective Estimation of Contact Force and Torque for Vision-based Tactile Sensor with Helmholtz-Hodge Decomposition
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

Retrieving rich contact information from robotic tactile sensing has been a challenging, yet significant task for the effective perception of object properties that the robot interacts with. This work is dedicated to developing an algorithm to estimate contact force and torque for vision-based tactile sensors. We first introduce the observation of the contact deformation patterns of hyperelastic materials under ideal single-axial loads in simulation. Then based on the observation, we propose a method of estimating surface forces and torque from the contact deformation vector field with the Helmholtz-Hodge Decomposition (HHD) algorithm. Extensive experiments of calibration and baseline comparison are followed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of prediction error and variance. The proposed algorithm is further integrated into a contact force visualization module as well as a closed-loop adaptive grasp force control framework and is shown to be useful in both visualization of contact stability and minimum force grasping task.
Multi-Cell Sparse Activity Detection for Massive Random Access: Massive MIMO versus Cooperative MIMO
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

This paper considers sparse device activity detection for cellular machine-type communications with non-orthogonal signatures using the approximate message passing algorithm. This paper compares two network architectures, massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and cooperative MIMO, in terms of their effectiveness in overcoming inter-cell interference. In the massive MIMO architecture, each base station (BS) detects only the users from its own cell while treating inter-cell interference as noise. In the cooperative MIMO architecture, each BS detects the users from neighboring cells as well; the detection results are then forwarded in the form of log-likelihood ratio (LLR) to a central unit where final decisions are made. This paper analytically characterizes the probabilities of false alarm and missed detection for both architectures. Numerical results validate the analytic characterization and show that as the number of antennas increases, a massive MIMO system effectively drives the detection error to zero, while as the cooperation size increases, the cooperative MIMO architecture mainly improves the cell-edge user performance. Moreover, this paper studies the effect of LLR quantization to account for the finite-capacity fronthaul. Numerical simulations of a practical scenario suggest that in that specific case cooperating three BSs in a cooperative MIMO system achieves about the same cell-edge detection reliability as a non-cooperative massive MIMO system with four times the number of antennas per BS.
Learning Belief Representations for Imitation Learning in POMDPs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2019
Year: 2019

We consider the problem of imitation learning from expert demonstrations in partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). Belief representations, which characterize the distribution over the latent states in a POMDP, have been modeled using recurrent neural networks and probabilistic latent variable models, and shown to be effective for reinforcement learning in POMDPs. In this work, we investigate the belief representation learning problem for generative adversarial imitation learning in POMDPs. Instead of training the belief module and the policy separately as suggested in prior work, we learn the belief module jointly with the policy, using a task-aware imitation loss to ensure that the representation is more aligned with the policy's objective. To improve robustness of representation, we introduce several informative belief regularization techniques, including multi-step prediction of dynamics and action-sequences. Evaluated on various partially observable continuous-control locomotion tasks, our belief-module imitation learning approach (BMIL) substantially outperforms several baselines, including the original GAIL algorithm and the task-agnostic belief learning algorithm. Extensive ablation analysis indicates the effectiveness of task-aware belief learning and belief regularization.
New Optimal $Z$-Complementary Code Sets from Matrices of Polynomials
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2019
Year: 2019

The concept of paraunitary (PU) matrices arose in the early 1990s in the study of multi-rate filter banks. So far, these matrices have found wide applications in cryptography, digital signal processing, and wireless communications. Existing PU matrices are subject to certain constraints on their existence and hence their availability is not guaranteed in practice. Motivated by this, for the first time, we introduce a novel concept, called $Z$-paraunitary (ZPU) matrix, whose orthogonality is defined over a matrix of polynomials with identical degree not necessarily taking the maximum value. We show that there exists an equivalence between a ZPU matrix and a $Z$-complementary code set when the latter is expressed as a matrix with polynomial entries. Furthermore, we investigate some important properties of ZPU matrices, which are useful for the extension of matrix sizes and sequence lengths. Finally, we propose a unifying construction framework for optimal ZPU matrices which includes existing PU matrices as a special case.
DAL: Dual Adversarial Learning for Dialogue Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

In open-domain dialogue systems, generative approaches have attracted much attention for response generation. However, existing methods are heavily plagued by generating safe responses and unnatural responses. To alleviate these two problems, we propose a novel framework named Dual Adversarial Learning (DAL) for high-quality response generation. DAL is the first work to innovatively utilizes the duality between query generation and response generation to avoid safe responses and increase the diversity of the generated responses. Additionally, DAL uses adversarial learning to mimic human judges and guides the system to generate natural responses. Experimental results demonstrate that DAL effectively improves both diversity and overall quality of the generated responses. DAL outperforms the state-of-the-art methods regarding automatic metrics and human evaluations.
3D Multi-Robot Patrolling with a Two-Level Coordination Strategy
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2019
Year: 2019

Teams of UGVs patrolling harsh and complex 3D environments can experience interference and spatial conflicts with one another. Neglecting the occurrence of these events crucially hinders both soundness and reliability of a patrolling process. This work presents a distributed multi-robot patrolling technique, which uses a two-level coordination strategy to minimize and explicitly manage the occurrence of conflicts and interference. The first level guides the agents to single out exclusive target nodes on a topological map. This target selection relies on a shared idleness representation and a coordination mechanism preventing topological conflicts. The second level hosts coordination strategies based on a metric representation of space and is supported by a 3D SLAM system. Here, each robot path planner negotiates spatial conflicts by applying a multi-robot traversability function. Continuous interactions between these two levels ensure coordination and conflicts resolution. Both simulations and real-world experiments are presented to validate the performances of the proposed patrolling strategy in 3D environments. Results show this is a promising solution for managing spatial conflicts and preventing deadlocks.
A Model of the Optimal Selection of Crypto Assets
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2019
Year: 2019

We propose a modelling framework for the optimal selection of crypto assets. Crypto assets differ by two essential features: security (technological) and stability (governance). Investors make choices over crypto assets similarly to how they make choices by using a recommender app: the app presents each investor with a pair of crypto assets with certain security-stability characteristics to be compared. Each investor submits its preference for adopting one of the two assets to the app. The app, in turn, provides a recommendation on whether the proposed adoption is sensible given the assets' essential features, information about the adoption choices of all other investors, and expected future economic benefits of adoption. Investors continue making their adoption choices over all pairs of crypto assets until their expected future economic benefits can no longer be improved upon. This constitutes an optimal selection decision. We simulate optimal selection decisions considering the behaviour of different types of investors, driven by their attitudes towards assets' features. We find a variety of possible emergent outcomes for the investments in the crypto-ecosystem and the future adoption of the crypto assets.
Investigating Biases in Textual Entailment Datasets
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2019
Year: 2019

The ability to understand logical relationships between sentences is an important task in language understanding. To aid in progress for this task, researchers have collected datasets for machine learning and evaluation of current systems. However, like in the crowdsourced Visual Question Answering (VQA) task, some biases in the data inevitably occur. In our experiments, we find that performing classification on just the hypotheses on the SNLI dataset yields an accuracy of 64%. We analyze the bias extent in the SNLI and the MultiNLI dataset, discuss its implication, and propose a simple method to reduce the biases in the datasets.